Ouroboros
by hikachu
Summary: There is a point where you should realize: love isn't enough; it will never be enough. Spoilers for Rebuild 3.0.


**Ouroboros**

There is a point where you should realize: love isn't enough; it will never be enough.

There are countless poems and countless songs and countless smiles frozen on canvas that bloom across the millennia to sing love's praise, and you adore them all, but there are far more broken hearts and lost smiles than there will ever be happy endings—and you should know this, too.

Perhaps you do, and believe you're the exception. You and your boy.

In some lifetimes, you tell him: we are children that share the same fate, and you manage to make it sound like a promise of happiness, not scary at all; a sign from that usually uncaring god that your only true place is beside each other. We share the same fate, you say as you keep trying to defy fate and fail, and time after time you're still smiling without ever needing to fake it, as if you had no reason to hold a grudge against this world, as if the universe had every right to do this to him, but no, it's none of this, there will never be any of this; the thing is, you cannot stop hoping because you are forever in love.

There should have been a point where you finally realized, that you can love him all you want but that love alone will not change his past, or his father, or everything that is wrong with the world and makes him wish he could just disappear.

You should have realized, that your affection for a single boy won't erase the frailty and the selfishness of every other human being, that you can't stop them from making each other miserable and that this means that he will always be miserable as well, that something in your plans will most likely go wrong and you will fail once again. Actually, you do know these things and they make you love mankind in ways that your boy never could because he's delicate and transient, like the small blossoms they love in Japan. But the theoretical possibility of success is there: a cold and hard, mathematical fact, it exists, even if only on an abstract level, even if only in your mind (so far, you add with a grin), and it gives you hope because you are in love and, perhaps, because no matter how much you wish for it at times, you will never really be human.

This world will never really be yours and perhaps that's why you can stare at it like it were the purest, most beautiful thing; perhaps that's why you can leave it every time without regretting its destiny or its end.

Your boy is never really yours and perhaps that's why you decide that there is no meaning to your life other than his happiness. Should he hate you, should he leave you, should he reject you, should he forget you—should you die, what will only ever matter is: seeing him smile again.

There is a point where you should learn that this is noble only in words; that it is, instead, foolish, futile, endlessly fruitless. Maybe this moment will never come for you because your non human heart never breaks (not unless he's watching you die—he always cries when you die, and you wish, every time, that you could find the right words, the right tone, the right expression to make him understand, believe that it's not really the end).

Maybe this moment is a ghost that already visited you once, and you were too blind, too hopeful, too in love to notice what would have been an undesired guest anyway: maybe it was that lifetime where you thought that meeting as children would help you protect him from everything from the beginning; instead it only made his tears sting more when he yelled, even you, as he felt betrayed by the whole world. Or it could have been that time you met at school, and he let you kiss him, only to push you away when someone caught you, and then he never looked you in the eye again, not until the day you died and he _had_ to. It could have been any of those endless chances for despair, but you were blind and your heart never broke enough.

And so you smile at him again when you call, Shinji-kun, and promise, don't make that face, we will surely meet again, because you will keep trying until love is finally enough.


End file.
